Burgzand - Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed

16
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returning from the Battle of the Downs (1639).
Wreck BZN 4 was thought locally to be a lighter
carrying water barrels, but it turned out to be a
mid-18th-century West Indiaman – the only one
ever found in Dutch waters – with a cargo of coffee
beans in barrels made of tropical hardwood,
and cocoa. Wreck BZN 8 was regarded locally as
a Dutch East India Company galliot (the Lelie),
but it was found to be a large vessel with features
that suggested foreign origins. No cargo
was found, though a bronze bell made in 1658
by the famous bronze caster and carillon maker
Franciscus Hemony was discovered. A large
number of small interesting items were found,
including navigation instruments and remains of
woollen clothing. The ship probably foundered
shortly after 1658, possibly in the terrible storm
in the night of 18/19 december 1660. Wreck BZN
10 was a large merchant vessel armed with lots
of small cannons from the second half of the
17th century. It was carrying a varied cargo which
included hundreds of earthenware jars containing
bentonite and urine for the textile industry,
crates of slate, crates containing various items of
brass and iron, barrels of grapes and lots of
remains of equipment and rigging. This wreck
was still extremely well intact at the time of our
first investigation, and only recently began to
wash clear.
Though a lot of the structure of wreck BZN 9
(mid-17th century) had remained preserved, the
top was already heavily damaged and find material
was virtually confined to the bow and stern.
A cargo of Pisa earthenware in the cabin suggested
the vessel sailed through the Straits of Gibraltar
into the Mediterranean. Here, only the
areas containing finds were covered, and the differences
between the deterioriation of the covered
and uncovered parts was systematically
monitored. Major differences were observed. It
was possible to see how, year after year, the exposed
structure was damaged by dragnets and
by shipworm and other natural processes, while
the covered parts remained stable.
Five of the twelve wrecks investigated were thus
physically protected, and the other seven were
essentially abandoned. In view of the scarce resources
available for further research and management,
choices had to be made. However, it
should be borne in mind that, given the brief
history of underwater archaeological investigations,
little such research has been conducted to
date in the Netherlands, so little knowledge and
literature are available in this field. Each of the
wrecks abandoned in this project would almost
certainly have yielded new insights into the construction
of these historic oceangoing vessels. In
the IJsselmeer polders, where almost 500 shipwrecks
have been found since the drainage operation
– although again only a portion of them
have been documented – the post-Medieval
wrecks are almost all inland vessels. Although
there is a great deal of variation among them,
they are fundamentally different from the oceangoing
ships found off Texel. We have barely had
any opportunity to study original remains of
oceangoing vessels from the 15th to 18th century,
or the associated find complexes. This is all
the more unfortunate if we consider how important
these vessels were to our history as a maritime
trading nation.
One of the questions posed at the outset of this
project was whether an area-wide approach
would enable us to gain a better insight into the
nature and causes of degradation processes at
the wreck sites. This certainly turned out to be
the case. We saw various degradation processes
at work in parallel, at successive stages. This has
given us a much more vivid and complete picture
than if we had worked on a single wreck in
the region. At the same time, we were able to
see the bigger picture, enabling us to answer the
question of why, after so many centuries of relative
stability, so much of the sediment is now
eroding away. It became clear that human intervention
far away in terms of both place and time had
so disrupted the water regime that decades later,
archaeological heritage appears to be ‘suddenly’
and rapidly lost. In this case, the cause
was the construction of the Afsluitdijk, the barrier
that created the IJsselmeer, in 1932, which
forced the incoming flood tide to take another
route. This led, among other things, to the dra-